Archetypes are elective; they merely
provide some structure to well recognized
broad skills sets that are useful to Running
in a general sense. Players are free to
use or ignore the idea of Archetypes to
inform their character design.

STARTING EQUIPMENT

Players start with free points in three
Resource Pools as described in the Dark
Champions Genre book, as illustrated in
the adjoining table. However, these numbers
are modified by some Origins.

RESOURCE POOL

POINTS

Equipment

60

Vehicles \ Bases

10

Contacts \ Followers

5

Metas start with Equipment Pool (30)

Adepts get 15 free character points
with which to buy more Pool.

INCREASING RESOURCE POOLS

Players can spend extra character points
to increase the size of their Resource Pools.
This is not a 1:1 ratio; a single character
point will buy more than one point of Pool,
at different rates by type of Resource Pool
(this is explained on page 151 of Dark Champions
and cannot be reprinted here with out infringing
on HERO Games' IP).

Extra points are purchased as a Perk (if
using HERO Designer, use the Custom Perk).

CREDIT COSTS OF STARTING EQUIPMENT

Characters do not have to pay the credit
cost of Equipment that they start with in
their Equipment Resource Pool. If a character
has more gear than they can fit into their
Resource Pool the character must pay the
credit cost for the extra Equipment from
their starting funds.

EQUIPMENT AVAILABILITY

The Equipment Availability Perks detailed
in Dark Champions are in effect. To
start with Equipment of a particular type
a character must have the appropriate Equipment
Availablity level. In addition to starting
play such items characters with these perks
are assumed to have connections that allow
them to acquire these items during play
with greater ease than other characters.

RESOURCE POOL

POINTS

Standard

Free

Enforcement

3

Military

5

Advanced Military

10

Characters that lack these Perks might acquire
higher grade equipment via play every now
and then but it should be unusual and sporadic,
and they wont be able to easily replace
such gear.

Military covers grenades,
machine guns, high grade body armor, basic
military vehicles, and restricted military
issue. It also covers all light to medium
military air and ground vehicles such as
Armored Reconnaissance Vehicles, observation
planes, transport helicopters, and similar
mid-grade units.

This paradigm is expected to be mid powered
and to rise into high power as Runners gain
experience. It is assumed that new characters
in this paradigm start with 125 Base Points
and up to 100 points from Disadvantages.
This value can be altered by the GM at will.

HIGH / LOW

A GM can easily kickstart the campaign to
a higher level of play by granting Experience
to characters to represent their status
as veteran adventurers when the campaign
starts, but this is not as common in this
paradigm. Similarly the GM could downscale
the characters to represent that they are
somewhat green when the campaign starts

EXPERIENCE

In play GMs should be somewhat fluid with
XP awards to encourage a sense of growing
power and so that the scale of the antagonists
can be ramped up as the group takes on bigger
and more dangerous missions. Without this
feeling of ascending scale a sense of boredom
can set in; you can only break into a regional
office to hack a corporate mainframe so
many times before it becomes routine. There
are always bigger, more dangerous missions
that can be cooked up to maintain the challenge
level, and when a GM starts to feel like
the game is in a comfortable place the XP
flow can be tapered off to keep the PC's
in that point range for a while.

RELATIVE POINT LEVELS

The following chart vaguely indicates relative
status levels by adjusted character points.
The titles are not intended to have any
literal meaning; they are just intended
to give an idea of the status of a character
with that many character points relative
to the setting.